It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

I’m strictly for Stevenson. I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

To err is human; to forgive, divine.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

Libraries raised me.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

When you are asked if you can do a job, tell ‚em, ‚Certainly I can!‘ Then get busy and find out how to do it.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

I still learn, but I think it’s the best thing in life to have a kid.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.